Goodness only settles into a particular restaurant from time to time, following a logic of its own. Restaurant diners, gym eaters, and socially fluent people suddenly agree that a new place is “The One,” and fame gathers like a heat dome. Right now, bridges there. My phone buzzes with renewed attention from long-lost friends: “Hello, honey!!” A friend of mine who just returned from Paris sent me a message. “Do you know who to email for bridge resy?” “Oh, this is a great place for a first date,” said a MoMA curator I met, “you want to be seen on.” On my last two visits, once with friends and once entertaining a table of 20-something food influencers, I encountered the same food world stalwart, one of whom caps his clout with a YES CHEF trucker hat.

In this case, the chef is Sam Lawrence, an Australian who cut his teeth. Estela and became the culinary manager of Ignacio Mattos’ restaurant group. It’s no insult to say that Bridges is recognisably Estela-like, a callback to the design dining era that borrows less from the raunchy bistro playbook of recent years and steers itself in a cooler, more clinical direction. The best dishes at Estela and here at Bridges have the feel of well-designed science experiments, small, spare arrangements pared down to the essentials, underpromising and over-presentation. Even the menu styles, presented as floating lists (“fried arroz nigger, calamari and romesco” at Estela, “sweetbreads, leeks and mustard” at Bridges), with their suggestive/obscure poems that raise more questions than they answer, stick to the theme. . Bridges has a cool elegance Billy Cotton– the dining room, designed with a chrome and concrete scheme, is a nod to the Brutalism of the nearby Chatham Towers.

Lawrence’s cooking is harder to spot. the chef himself notes French technique and Basque flavors seem to be in the ether of the city right now. (Basque on Bridges, Basque on Aaron Crowder eel stickSmall but lively in Basque Meson In Brooklyn…) there’s also Japanese (umeboshi in béarnaise), Cantonese (XO-style sauce in pommes purées), and Australian (lemon and coffee meringue dessert).

It sings where everything comes together. My table devoured the strangely delicious appetizer of sardines and anchovies on small slices of sourdough toast. It’s not complicated cooking, but it requires a certain amount of chutzpah to double down on the oily fish flavor and deft eye for textures, making it more interesting than what might otherwise be a disposable hors d’oeuvre: the voluptuous chew of the escabeche’d with sardines, oily anchovies, and the same semi-fertile a bit of bull horn pepper with a bite. This resilient texture is one Lawrence returns to again and again. It’s not overcooked, not cured: literally, in the case of seared tuna wrapped around plump persimmons (devils on seahorse backs?), more figuratively, in a luxurious plate of crab legs parboiled in fragrant butter in their own cracked shells.

Pay attention paid Bridges’ Comté tart would be little more than its quiche cousin if the various textures hadn’t been sanded or puffed: the crust is crumbly, dessert-like malted barley shortcrust, filled mousse, and egg is fluffy. “I would buy a wedding cake out of this!” One of my fellow diners cried – vin yellow-soaked mushrooms on top. Texturally, it rhymes with a chawanmushi-style custard dotted with uni lobes and a bit of raw shrimp paste.

If the talk of texture and raw shrimp whets your appetite, Bridges is the restaurant for you. You don’t exactly need to be brave, but you do need to be playful. There isn’t a single vegetarian option among the main courses – at least when I was there, although Bridges iterates admirably, with new dishes appearing and disappearing in the opening weeks – and the menu isn’t all that casual and sauce-centric as many of them are children’s menus for adults organizations were clustered around the city at this time. I can argue about this or that. Most of the food is quite brown and there aren’t many fresh vegetables either. (The puntarelle sprigs of the zucchini salad are a bit cruciferous, and the Little Gems with Asian pear and trout roe are a bit expendable.) But the big swings at Bridges are more interesting than the line out the door for new pizza rolls. You should try the soy glazed desserts. You must try the Macedonian Riesling – by the glass!

Ambition is sexy. The room is sexy. How often will the hot spot be this uncompromising? Most likely over and over again, but nothing more than that. That’s the thing about bridges: They go somewhere.